"If you care a lot about the future, it shows that you believe in what you're doing now and you think it's worthwhile enough to have some lasting impact." – Syd Mead

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internet abuse

I was prompted by another blog post I read to check up on the situation with indquery.com, which I had complained about earlier. It looks like it’s been resolved. I checked the site and all I saw was an ASP.Net directory structure. So it looks like it’s down.

I was getting ready to take any action I could to help with this, but I was running up against getting ready for a trip I had scheduled for months. So I didn’t get to it. Perhaps they only planned to keep the site up temporarily. I don’t know how these scams work. Or perhaps other folks did the legwork of getting Google to remove the ads from his “honeypot”. They had copied other people’s stuff, too. If so, thank you very much, whoever you are. It was distressing to see articles I’d put effort and thought into blatantly copied and reattributed to the site’s owner just so they could make a Deutsche Mark (the site was German).

I’ve been signing my posts as a matter of course since then, so hopefully even if my posts are copied again, people will be able to know who wrote them and how to get here.

I first noticed this on reddit today, but eventually saw it in some pingbacks to my blog (at tekkie.wordpress.com). Somebody has a “blog” hosted in Germany that is ripping off other people’s blog posts and posting them as his own at www.indquery.com. He’s copied a bunch of my posts. In one case I saw he copied a Wikipedia entry. So far, of my posts, this guy’s copied in full (by title):

Straying into dangerous territory
Squeak is like an operating system
Redefining Computing, Part 2
Redefining Computing, Part 1
The real computer revolution
Having fun playing with fire,…er C
Seaside hosting redux
Coding like writing
Squeak/anti-virus problem solved

Secondly the blogger has ads on his site, so I don’t know. Maybe he’s making some money off of what I wrote. He never asked me for permission to reproduce my stuff. In any case, he sucks. My guess is this guy’s looking for what might be popular articles for wherever he is, and trying to attract traffic, taking all the credit for it.

To tell you the truth, I don’t mind if other people copy what I post, but at least have the decency to give me credit, and a link to this blog. That’s just basic etiquette. I do tend to put a lot of work into what I write, so I want to at least get credit for it. I’ve been doing it in the interest of sharing knowledge, not trying to profit from it in an immediately tangible way (though that thought has crossed my mind from time to time).

Anybody have any ideas about administrative action I can take to deal with this leech?